That's an idea that was modestly proposed by several pundits after the Australian actor's surprise death last year, and it has picked up steam off the phenomenal summer box-office success of "The Dark Knight" and his posthumous Oscar nomination last month.

And Ledger's chances of finding an exalted place in the Hollywood firmament will further be improved if history is made on Oscar night (Feb. 22) and he fulfills the Vegas oddsmakers' predictions by becoming the first deceased winner in the supporting actor category.

This kind of deification is, of course, a tall order. Only a handful of stars who died young have had the kind of resonance that grows with time, transcends generational taste and seems to sum up their eras. Still, in many ways, Ledger looks good for the job.

For one thing, he's the right age. His demise at 28 places him in the demographic center of the pantheon of such stars: a few years older than Dean (24) and Harlow (26), a few years younger than Valentino (31), Lee (32) and Monroe (36).

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For another, no one can deny he was on the cusp of a brilliant career. Though many of his 18 films are mediocre, he jumped to the head of the pack of young stars in 2005 with one undeniably great performance -- the heartbreaking gay cowboy of "Brokeback Mountain." And he halfway matched this feat with his startlingly change-of-pace performance as the nihilistic Joker in "The Dark Knight" -- an unusual star turn that seems to speak to disaffected young people in some indefinable way and was a major contributor to the film's success.

A further argument for Ledger's special posterity may be the mere fact of his nationality. In an era in which many of our top movie stars are from Down Under -- Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman -- what's more appropriate than the new James Dean being an Aussie?

Taken together, this set of circumstances makes a powerful argument for immortality. Even so, my bet is that -- win or lose -- Oscar night will be Ledger's last hurrah as a star and he'll thereafter take his humble place as a footnote on the movie history of the early new millennium.

Why is this? Mainly because all the great movie-star death cults of the past have been, according to the experts, psychosexual in nature: expressions of suppressed longing for or identity with stars who embody certain distinct aspects of sexuality. Ledger was a standard hunk who gradually became a very good actor. None of his roles -- even "Brokeback Mountain," with its landmark gay character -- made him any particular kind of sexual icon, and he has no unique or clearly identifiable movie-star persona.

Even more worrisome for Ledger's enduring legacy is the fact that, while the rock music business since the '60s has produced a steady stream of live-hard-die-young martyrs, the movies simply have not proven to be fertile ground from the same kind of lingering adulation.

It has been 36 years since Bruce Lee's death, and while mini cults have sprung up around the memories of rapper-actor Tupac Shakur (gunned down at 25) and Lee's son, Brandon (accidentally killed on a film set at 28), there has been no comparable phenomenon since.

Curiously, the legacy of the two most striking young-star deaths of this period -- John Belushi (33) and River Phoenix (23) -- has been less veneration than viable careers for the stars' younger brothers. (It's as if the audience, now trained to accept inferior movie sequels, merely moved on to Belushi II and Phoenix II.)

In the past four decades, there has been a paradigm shift in the way the public perceives its movie celebrities. Stars no longer live on Mount Olympus, and they don't tend to inspire the kind of devotion in today's sexually liberated audience that once made hundreds of women go into hysteria at the sight of Valentino's casket.

Picked apart on the talk shows, routinely libeled in the tabloids and endlessly belittled on thousands of Internet sites, today's film stars are as much figures of suspicion, resentment and scorn as adoration. Their weaknesses fascinate us more than any fantasies they may inspire.

A little more than a year after his death, the image of Ledger that continues to come down to us is not of some golden boy cut down in his prime but of a confused, unhappy, financially pressed young man who died because he couldn't sleep at night and accidentally took too many pills.

Does this vision, morbidly fascinating as it may be, speak to the current young generation of moviegoers profoundly enough for them to enshrine it in their mythology and carry it with them as some cherished sexual symbol throughout their lives? Only time will tell, but it seems very doubtful to me.